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> Algorithmic line-drawing of single-member winner-take-all district pretty much guarantees poorly-representative districts A) The status quo is massive Gerrym

> Algorithmic line-drawing of single-member winner-take-all district pretty much guarantees poorly-representative districts A) The status quo is massive Gerrymandering, so something like the Shortest Splitline Algorithm would be a massive improvement. B) The point is not to make quasi-proportional-representation with districts. The point is to make a legislature whose laws are representative. To that end, it does not matter if the constituents of a given district happen to have a lot in common.

dragonwriter 11y ago
No line drawing method on single member districts does that, and the best way to get laws which represents e people effectively is by assuring better proportionality. This had, in fact, been studied quite a bit, see, e.g., Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy. Mucking around with variations on how our by whom lines are drawn for single-member, plurality or majority runoff districts and thinking that that had some how of meaningful improvement is self-delusion. It doesn't work, it can't work, we know why it can't work, and we know what does work, all from actual experience in real representative democracies. Playing around with how district lives are drawn isn't democratic reform, it's democracy theater, a means of diverting attention without changing anything meaningful.
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  "Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing. Gerrymandering can add ~30% of representatives for the party controlling it, so changing it to a party method does improve things a lot, even if it is arguably very far from perfect.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > "Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing. Its only a thing when the "perfect" is not a real alternative. Systems that produce more proportional representation than any means of line drawing in single-member winner-take-all districts are real alternatives that are well-established in the real world.
    - BurningFrog 11y ago
      Well, proportional representation is mathematically and theoretically possible in the US, but culturally and politically as likely as adopting Chinese as official language. That won't change for decades at least. But changing how districts are drawn actually does happen in this country. California degerrymanderified their process a few years ago.
notahacker 11y ago
Which optimization criteria and algorithm to use is also a political decision, and the people making that decision are the same as the ones responsible for massive gerrymandering. It's actually easier to defend perverse results[1] if they're the consequence of a redistricting from scratch by the "fair" algorithm you've chosen rather than arbitrarily switching parts of cities from one countryside district to another in a way which looks suspiciously like you've been paying attention to their demographics. [1]like the Olson criterion, which when optimised by a computer program results in district boundaries apparently likely to return mostly Republicans in California...
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  Its worth noting that almost any party-blind algorithm for drawing district lives is going to overrepresent Republicans, because Democratic support is very concentrated in large cities, resulting in most party-blind algorithms creating few super majority Democratic districts and many bare majority Republican districts. (Few and many both being in relation to the proportion of each party in the populace.)
  - randcraw 11y ago
    In the rural US, any district outside an urban area is NOT a 'bare majority republican district'; they're all large majority republican districts. Rural America is devoutly republican, outside recently formed border districts (formed since 1980) that are largely immigrant. Most gerrymandering doesn't bias rural districts; it biases suburban districts that are marginal majorities (usu republican) only after redrawing the lines. Any automatic line redrawing algorithm will defeat this, since it takes a lot of perverse effort to draw boundaries that are sufficiently biased to serve Machiavellian pols.

dragonwriter 11y ago

No line drawing method on single member districts does that, and the best way to get laws which represents e people effectively is by assuring better proportionality. This had, in fact, been studied quite a bit, see, e.g., Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy. Mucking around with variations on how our by whom lines are drawn for single-member, plurality or majority runoff districts and thinking that that had some how of meaningful improvement is self-delusion. It doesn't work, it can't work, we know why it can't work, and we know what does work, all from actual experience in real representative democracies. Playing around with how district lives are drawn isn't democratic reform, it's democracy theater, a means of diverting attention without changing anything meaningful.

BurningFrog 11y ago
"Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing. Gerrymandering can add ~30% of representatives for the party controlling it, so changing it to a party method does improve things a lot, even if it is arguably very far from perfect.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > "Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing. Its only a thing when the "perfect" is not a real alternative. Systems that produce more proportional representation than any means of line drawing in single-member winner-take-all districts are real alternatives that are well-established in the real world.
  - BurningFrog 11y ago
    Well, proportional representation is mathematically and theoretically possible in the US, but culturally and politically as likely as adopting Chinese as official language. That won't change for decades at least. But changing how districts are drawn actually does happen in this country. California degerrymanderified their process a few years ago.

notahacker 11y ago

Which optimization criteria and algorithm to use is also a political decision, and the people making that decision are the same as the ones responsible for massive gerrymandering. It's actually easier to defend perverse results[1] if they're the consequence of a redistricting from scratch by the "fair" algorithm you've chosen rather than arbitrarily switching parts of cities from one countryside district to another in a way which looks suspiciously like you've been paying attention to their demographics. [1]like the Olson criterion, which when optimised by a computer program results in district boundaries apparently likely to return mostly Republicans in California...

dragonwriter 11y ago
Its worth noting that almost any party-blind algorithm for drawing district lives is going to overrepresent Republicans, because Democratic support is very concentrated in large cities, resulting in most party-blind algorithms creating few super majority Democratic districts and many bare majority Republican districts. (Few and many both being in relation to the proportion of each party in the populace.)
- randcraw 11y ago
  In the rural US, any district outside an urban area is NOT a 'bare majority republican district'; they're all large majority republican districts. Rural America is devoutly republican, outside recently formed border districts (formed since 1980) that are largely immigrant. Most gerrymandering doesn't bias rural districts; it biases suburban districts that are marginal majorities (usu republican) only after redrawing the lines. Any automatic line redrawing algorithm will defeat this, since it takes a lot of perverse effort to draw boundaries that are sufficiently biased to serve Machiavellian pols.